


memento immortalitatis (memento mori)

by lifeitself



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, timeless child contemplation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:48:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22998706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeitself/pseuds/lifeitself
Summary: It was in her bones, to run. Sewn into her, spliced into her genetics at the same time that her genetics were spliced into theirs. Gallifrey was a city stolen from her bones and built from her blood.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 77





	memento immortalitatis (memento mori)

* * *

_Crying silently. I mean children cry because they want attention. Because they're hurt or afraid. When they cry silently it's because they just can't stop._

* * *

Space is endless. It does not have corners, that one might be able to pick it up at the edges (as if it were a blanket) and fold it neatly into place. Space is large, teeming with life, and overwhelmingly _messy._ She likes it better that way. With space and distance and time, life can evolve into billions of iterations of itself, each one unique. 

She has always liked the space, the endless space that life is given to evolve into whatever it likes. Whatever it needs to be, to survive. 

But she looks at herself now, and she does not know, completely, what has brought her to this moment. What she has needed to be to survive in the past. What bits and pieces of those timeless children have stayed with her, shaped her, and pushed her forwards, even in the smallest of ways, into what she has become today. 

She used to be able to pull herself together, to an extent. Used to know where her edges were, because she had remembered everything about who she had ever been. Every memory distinct, carefully in place, catalogued and never forgotten. She had carried every piece of her past as a living testimony to her future, every memory as a dedication to her past selves and the people whom she had loved and lost. And her memories had spurred her on, each one a call to travel the universe and help where she could.

Now she feels like space. She does not know where her edges are. She is teeming with so many multitudes she cannot even name them all or comprehend them. She cannot catalogue herself. She knows she will still move forwards. But she is a vast expanse now, no longer able to be catalogued. 

* * *

_We all change, when you think about it. We are all different people all through our lives and that's okay, that's good you've got to keep moving so long as you remember all the people that you used to be._

* * *

The Master did not destroy her. But he has torn the edges off of her. Torn off the hems of her memories, tinging each and every one with new information. He has doused every interaction she had ever had concerning Gallifrey with new and terrible meaning, and graffitied a question mark after each offhand remark she had ever made. He has added blank pages where she had marked a beginning. 

She feels at the same time both very close and very distant from herself. It is enough to make her want to lie on the ground and feel the growing of the grass between her fingers, to lie in silence as the earth spins and spins beneath her. 

She does not want to think of the little child she was, yellow robes under pulsing purple skies, very alone and very lost. 

She does not want to think of Rassilon’s face outside of the barn on Gallifrey not so long ago, the snarl twisting his face as he asks her how many regenerations they have _given_ her- some sort of gift, indeed, to give someone what they have always had and do not know about- and tells her that he has the rest of time to kill her over and over and over again, all the while _knowing_ that the reason that the entirety of Gallifrey exists is because of her being killed over and over and over again. 

* * *

_“You couldn’t just stand there and watch children cry.”_

* * *

The Doctor knows what it is to be lonely. Knows what it is to be abandoned, even, knows what it is to be the last of one’s race. She already knows with great intimacy the feeling of being alone in the universe. She knows what that child under that purple sky must have felt. And she can almost imagine that she remembers. If she closes her eyes, she can almost picture herself in those golden robes. She knows the grief of that child _intimately._

She can imagine it all too well. She can paint the pictures of the Matrix in vivid emotion. But she cannot remember it, not properly, and she cannot catalogue it like she can catalogue everything else that has brought her to this point in her life. 

She has not been destroyed. 

She has been expanded, but the expanse is blank. 

She remembers the love she carried for her home planet. She remembers old companions’ faces as she painted for them the picture of her glowing city in a shining sphere. She remembers running from them, always running, remembers _exile._ She remembers their terrible evil that came from overwhelming power in the hands of the corrupt. 

She was the reason they were _made,_ and yet they erased her. She had been there at the birth of Gallifrey itself, because Gallifrey was born from her. Gallifrey was a city stolen from her bones and built from her blood.

It was a city carried on the back of a terrified child, a planet built on the murder of a child killed again and again and again.

* * *

_I am being diminished. Whittled away piece by piece. A man is the sum of his memories. A time-lord, even more so._

* * *

The past remembers her, even if she does not remember her past. She has been among the stars for more years than she even knows. Somewhere out in the universe, there are countless children growing and shaping the world around them. They are her. She was them, and she cannot remember a word of it. What she cannot remember does not change who she is, but it is still hers, and realizing its absence is like becoming aware of a chasm in the middle of herself, a black hole that has always been lodged between her ribs, unseen and unfelt but ever-present. It is gaping, big enough to fall through, it is a cliff on the edge of her lungs. And it pulls at her very hearts with every breath, tugging at her soul with the hands of a child, the hands of many children. But they are her own hands, unfamiliar as they are. 

* * *

_So is this how it works Doctor? You never interfere with the affairs of other peoples or planets, unless there are children crying?_

* * *

The Master had seen this as superior. Important, to be the blueprint with which Time Lords justified their dictatorship. Inferior, to be dependent on anyone but himself. To him, the rest of Gallifrey had been copies of her, mutants, genetic anomalies. Imposters. He felt as if he was nothing without her, because she was a part of him that he could not remove as he pleased. 

He had thought that if he could kill them both, they might both be equals in nothingness, therefore equals again, as they had been back when she was just Theta Sigma and he was Koschei. But what he did not comprehend was that she was no different than she had ever been. They were as equal as they had been from the beginning, two children in the golden grass of Gallifrey. She was no different than she had been as Theta Sigma. She was just less breakable than he was. 

* * *

_Two point four seven billion_.

* * *

They had erased her, but they could never stop her from running from them. It was in her bones, to run. Sewn into her, spliced into her genetics at the same time that her genetics were spliced into theirs. They had wondered at her obsession with Earth and the small, seemingly insignificant lifespans of her companions.

Memento mori, the Time Lords had called them. Reminders of death. 

They had been obsessed with immortality, and had achieved it at the cost of her childhoods. And at the same time, she had cradled the fragility of human life in her arms and they had scoffed. How ironic of them to look down upon what they had been while in order to glorify what they had stolen from her. 

How very Time Lord. 

* * *

_“And I'm from you.”_

_“You're an echo, that's all. A Time Lord is so much more. A sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, a shared suffering. You can't extrapolate a relationship from a biological accident.”_

* * *

She was not one of them. She was the same as she had always been, but she wasnow _more_ than she had ever known herself to be. She was full to the brim with stories she could not even remember, much less tell. She was herself, but her arms and fingers clawed through more time than even she knew. Her actions were her own, but there was more behind them. She was more than she had thought, but the same as she had always been. Still a traveller. Still running. Memories still held close to her hearts.

She would be alright. 

* * *

_Whoever you were in the past or are in the future, we know who you are right now. The best person we know. And whatever is coming for you, we'll be here. Cos we're your mates. Well, not just mates._

_Family._

* * *


End file.
